We’ve started the year with a series of longer, standalone articles on this website, but I want to go a different direction today and hit a few different topics that have been on my mind this week. Also, while we’re here, one programming note: I will publish normally next week but then be off for vacation on the following Friday, February 27th. For now, let’s go to Japan.

Takaichi and the Democracy Variable

About two weeks after she’d taken office in October, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was already driving China insane. The inciting incident came November 7th during testimony in the Diet, as Takaichi departed from longstanding Japanese ambiguity and suggested that a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan. Such a situation is one of several limited exceptions to a pacifist Japanese constitution that restricts the use of military force, and Takaichi’s candid response to a question from an opposition lawmaker was a strong implication that Japan would join multi-lateral military efforts to defend Taiwan.

A conniption ensued. From Bloomberg in November:

Takaichi said that if military force were to be used in a Taiwan conflict, including the use of warships, it could be considered a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan. That classification is significant because it would provide a legal justification for Japan to deploy its military to help defend friendly nations.

Her comments on Friday sparked anger from Xue Jian, the consul-general of China in the western city of Osaka, who took to X to say that Japan’s stance in considering a Taiwan contingency as threatening its own survival as a fatal path chosen by “foolish politicians.” “If you go sticking that filthy neck where it doesn’t belong, it’s gonna get sliced right off. You ready for that?” Xue wrote in a separate post. 

Xue, the consul-general in Osaka, eventually deleted the comments about beheading a sitting foreign leader. His media peers continued the offensive—a CCTV Twitter account asked whether Takaichi was kicked in the head by a donkey, a China Daily commenter called the Prime Minister an “American running dog,” while Hu Xijin, the former editor of the Global Times, called Takaichi “an evil witch.” 

Chinese diplomats and journalists may have been trying to make an example of Japan and Takaichi in an effort to warn other countries in the region against allying with Taiwan or the U.S.. Whatever their motivations, the volume and tone of the response was pretty unhinged. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned, “Whoever dares to challenge China’s bottom line will face a resolute, head-on blow and be shattered against the great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” while a spokesman added, “Those who play with fire will perish by it!” The rhetoric was followed by a raft of escalatory actions, including China advising its citizens not to travel to Japan for vacations, suspending select Japanese imports, pulling Japanese performers off stage in China, and restricting the flow of rare earths to Japanese companies.

All of the above is useful context for Xi Jinping’s semi-regular attempts to cast China as a “responsible global actor,” and, of course, for Takaichi’s soaring popularity in Japan over the past few months and her party’s landslide victories in last Sunday’s elections. The Takaichi-led Liberal Democratic Party now has a super-majority within Japan’s government, and from a geopolitical perspective, that means Takaichi will have wide latitude to increase military spending and move in lockstep with the United States. China’s attempts to isolate Japan in the wake of Takaichi’s comments—meetings with governments throughout Asia and letters to the U.K., France, and United Nations—were unavailing on every front, and ultimately left China looking like the isolated party. Worse, the entire affair seemed to make clear to the Japanese public that concerns over Chinese aggression are not hypothetical, and increased military spending (a Takaichi tentpole) is probably a reasonable response.

A popular reaction to this sequence has been to revel in the blindspots exposed in Chinese strategy. I certainly understand the sentiment, and agree that China’s insecure, aggressive and ultimately clarifying behavior tends to be counterproductive. I also can’t help but admire any world leader who, to channel Holly McLane in Die Hard, can drive the CCP that crazy. Bigger picture, though, what I found most interesting about Sunday’s landslide elections was the reminder from Japan that the democratic world’s response to China will be decided in no small part by the will of democratic voters.

Consider this a coda to what I wrote two weeks ago about the globalist world leaders who seem incapable of reckoning with the world as it exists today. To the extent the modern world requires clear-eyed leaders, the same will be true of citizens. Takaichi is not part of the globalist cohort; she is closer to an unapologetic nationalist and avowed fan of Trump. Her party dominated last weekend thanks to her personal popularity, with a platform that emphasizes immigration reform and cost of living concerns, in addition to her stance on Chinese aggression. Though she’s been branded “far right” by some in the media, this interview in the New Yorker describes her political instincts as more pragmatic than her critics seem to think.

Whether Takaichi succeeds or fails as Prime Minister, the opportunity she’s been given is a reflection of the Japanese people and what they want. And for all the world’s commentary on grand strategies and leaders at Davos, including my own, all these leaders have domestic considerations and constituents that will decide their fate and that of their agenda. Moreover, domestic elections are rarely decided by foreign policy, which means that local scandals can dramatically swing international affairs. Some of this obvious, of course, but because it goes without saying, we may not mention it enough. The primacy and capriciousness of domestic politics is so fundamental and such a foregone conclusion that it’s easy to overlook what a massive variable it is to any projections of our geopolitical future.

Take Keir Starmer, one star of last month’s article, who has spent the past two weeks embroiled in a scandal related to the Epstein files and a former U.K. Ambassador to the U.S. He currently sits as “the most unpopular British prime minister since records began”. Or take Kamala Harris, whose foreign policy would have been a lot more popular than Trump in both Beijing and Davos, and who lost in 2024 because of cultural issues, inflation and Elon Musk buying Twitter. Gavin Newsom, a U.S. contender in 2028, is notably friendly with China. Meanwhile, due in part to immigration resentment and economic anxiety, Japan now has a Prime Minister who is set to increase military spending to unprecedented post-war levels and sits squarely in alignment with the U.S.

As leaders all over the world stand for election in the years to come, there will be ample opportunity for voters to prioritize pragmatic strategies, national interests, and economic security—or not. The Dutch government recently appointed a series of hawkish ministers after last fall’s Nexperia mess, but the ruling parties lack a majority to set policy unilaterally. Elsewhere, rejecting U.S. calls to action is both popular and understandable, because the Trump Administration makes it hard to be loudly pro-America. Even tacitly aligning with Trump proved politically radioactive for center-right candidates in Australia and Canada. Likewise, spending billions of dollars on re-industrialization or re-armament efforts becomes less popular if it comes at the expense of social safety nets.

What should be clear to everyone is that if we’re in the middle of Schrödinger’s Cold War, many of the world’s most decisive strategic choices will be made not only by leaders, but by the people who live in these countries and choose who represents them. Outcomes will vary by country, including the United States, where this fall’s midterms provide an opportunity for voters to check Trump’s power (which may explain why the Administration is currently very invested in the stability of its China trade truce, and, by extension, the American economy).

In the meantime, Takaichi’s ascendance is good evidence that democracy is not, in fact, dying. Not in Japan, the United States, or elsewhere. That’s both affirming and reassuring and, when you consider what’s at stake and what typically drives domestic voting decisions, a bit unsettling.

How to Fix Tanking in the NBA

Last weekend the Utah Jazz introduced their newest star, Jaren Jackson Jr., and proceeded to bench him for the entire fourth quarter as the team forfeited a double-digit lead and lost the game on purpose to maximize their odds at landing a top draft pick in May’s NBA Draft Lottery.

From Jazz blog SLC Dunk:

For days, fans across the NBA anxiously awaited to see how the Jazz’s big man lineup of Lauri Markkanen at the three, Jackson at the four and Jusuf Nurkic (next year this spot will be filled by Walker Kessler) would play together. … At one point late in the third quarter on Saturday, the Jazz led the Orlando Magic by 17 points. Jackson and Markkanen were incredibly efficient, scoring 49 points on 55.3% field goal shooting. …

The trade was a success! This team is good!

A little too good.

In the fourth quarter, “Tank Note” took over. Head coach Will Hardy — and likely Danny Ainge and Ryan Smith — had seen enough of this new look team. Hardy yanked Jackson, Markkanen and Nurkic in the fourth quarter. With Keyonte George going out earlier in the game with an ankle injury, the Jazz managed to only play one starter in the fourth quarter, rookie Ace Bailey.

The Jazz lost the game 120-117. Just how they drew it up.

That was one of at least a dozen examples of increasingly egregious tanking seen across the NBA this year. I attended a Nets-Wizards game Brooklyn last weekend in which the Wizards sat more than half their team, and were trailing Brooklyn by 30 points with eight minutes left in the second quarter.

Displays like that are going to become even more common over the next two months. The current draft lottery system has more flattened odds than it used to and was adjusted in 2017 to dissuade the worst teams from tanking. That initiative has been an utter failure; today’s worst teams stay bad for longer, tanking year after year to land a top pick that’s now harder to secure, while the smoothed odds actually increase the expected returns to mediocre teams who decide to punt their season. This year it’s all become widespread, and after last week’s trade deadline, the NBA has at least seven teams (the Wizards, Kings, Jazz, Pacers, Nets, Mavericks, Grizzlies) with no incentive to win and lots of incentive to lose as many games as possible over the final two months.

Of the Jazz gimmicks—benching stars mid-game to ensure they lose (which they did again on Monday)—ESPN’s Bobby Marks said, “What Utah is doing right now is messing around with the integrity of the NBA.” He’s clearly right, of course. Instead of players throwing games, we saw a coach try to do it (the Jazz actually won Monday’s game; they’ve since shut Jackson Jr. down for the season). And to be clear, this isn’t an indictment of Hardy or his team; given the incentives of the current system, they’re making the right choice!

I may write more about the general malaise around the NBA in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, I’ll just note that while tanking has always been a problem, it will be an even bigger PR problem for the league in an environment where half the league’s superstars are injured, the season is so long that even teams themselves look “borderline disinterested”, and no one feels good about the state of the product. Throw in a quarter of the league sitting healthy players and openly punting 3-4 games a week, and it makes the whole league look like a tremendous waste of time.

So, here’s what the NBA could do to avoid this problem in the future.

• Teams in seventh place or lower, in both conferences, are all entered into the NBA lottery in May.
• Each of the 18 lottery teams has the same odds.
• The lottery determines the top five picks.
• Picks 6-18 are then determined by record, with the worst teams getting the highest picks.

That’s it!

That system pulls in playoff teams, broadening the pool of lottery entrants and further randomizing the outcome, while also limiting the incentive for, say, an eighth place team to tank out of the playoffs for a chance at a top five pick. Every lottery team gets a 6.25% chance at number one, and losing games in the meantime does not move the needle one way or the other. This would allow the Jazz to play their veterans in the fourth quarter, and the Wizards to play their young guys in Brooklyn. The worst teams in the NBA can still count on picking 6-10, potentially rebuilding with top ten picks across successive seasons. And yes, flattening the lottery odds would remove a surefire path to franchise-altering superstars—tanking entire seasons in exchange for draft position—but the NBA’s reformed odds have already sort of done that (while failing to curb tanking).

Mind you, unlike my admittedly wild prescriptions for the NBA Cup, what’s offered here is not a groundbreaking solution. We’re not abolishing the draft, introducing a wheel, etc. This is an obvious, common sense fix that would be better for the NBA’s business and has been sitting there for about 15 years.

If Adam Silver watches this season unfold and fails to galvanize owners to take any meaningful action in this direction, it will be yet another indictment of a commissioner who’s lost control of the league in a dozen other areas, as well. Alas, I’ll be surprised if that’s not exactly what happens.

In Defense of Regulation

From the New York Times Editorial Board:

This editorial board has long supported marijuana legalization. In 2014, we published a six-part series that compared the federal marijuana ban to alcohol prohibition and argued for repeal. Much of what we wrote then holds up — but not all of it does.

At the time, supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use.

It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong. Legalization has led to much more use. Surveys suggest that about 18 million people in the United States have used marijuana almost daily (or about five times a week) in recent years. That was up from around six million in 2012 and less than one million in 1992. More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol.

As a millennial who spent most my teens and twenties convinced that America needed legalized marijuana, the sentiments in that editorial resonate. The Times soft pedals the implications of its second-guessing, but the takeaway seems clear. The execution of legalization was mishandled, and while there are millions of people who can use marijuana recreationally without any consequences, the net impact of all this has been (and will continue to be) negative. Legalized gambling, particularly on apps, strikes me as a similar story.

The Times, for its part, argues that in the future marijuana should be regulated like alcohol and tobacco, mimicking “relatively high taxes, open-container laws and regulations on alcohol and nicotine levels,” and “balanc[ing] personal freedom and public health.” Reasonable, unobjectionable goals, but it’s not clear to me that those sorts of measures would be enough to curb some of the negative impacts the rest of the editorial describes.

Leaving aside the policy specifics of the debate itself, the discussion reminded me of a distinction that’s occurred to me a number of times over the course of hosting Sharp Tech and debating policy prescriptions for the tech world and beyond. “Government regulation” is a catch-all term that describes everything from building codes to antitrust enforcement to nuclear power plants to cigarette advertising. It’s also become a pejorative term, in the course of incoherent AI executive orders or Abundance-adjacent discussions about American rejuvenation, as politicians on both sides lament regulation that slows down businesses, grid expansions or rebuilding a home in Pacific Palisades. The risk, though, is that we consciously or subconsciously conflate all government interventions into private affairs as a sort of saftey-ist intrusion into the freedoms that have typically spurred American dynamism.

The early returns from legalized marijuana and gambling are good evidence that moral regulation, for one, was probably more useful in American life than critics like me acknowledged. Fewer people want to make that argument, because an entire generation of politically conscious people came to associate the concept of moral regulation with people like Jerry Falwell, Newt Gingrich or Tipper Gore. Unfortunately, running the other direction may not be much better. Compare the talking points from Adam Silver’s 2014 op-ed arguing for legalized gambling to this account from Bloomberg last month:

The average DraftKings customer, Funt says, loses about $100 a month on the site. (That’s roughly what the company reports for average monthly revenue per user.) … Then there are the more diffuse and far-reaching costs. A trio of researchers from UCLA and the University of Southern California documented declines in across-the-board financial well-being in states following the legalization of sports gambling. Calls to helplines, online searches for help with gambling, and other markers of problem gambling are rising, too. …

Calls to gamble are now woven seamlessly into sports broadcasts via ads, team and arena sponsorships and commentators’ steady discussion of odds, spreads and probabilities. It’s unavoidable and, for many casual fans, including parents, that’s a problem. More than 50% of sports fans now believe that ads for sports betting should be banned during games and say that gambling has hurt the integrity of the games, according to a recent Ipsos poll.

Athletes also report new levels of online harassment and temptation. In an anonymous poll of professional basketball players, nearly half said the NBA’s gambling partnerships were bad for the league, describing an onslaught of threats and entreaties from gamblers.

Here again, I’ll leave the specific debate over gambling to another article, and note only that the story is more complicated than Silver made it seem in 2014. Legalized gambling (and a complete absence of friction thanks to apps) is not a problem for many people, but is it good or bad for the majority?

Looking ahead, the concept of the moral regulation, or social health regulation, should not be taboo. Whether it’s smart phones in schools, the incentive structure of social media platforms, OnlyFans and porn, or regulating and/or repealing legalized weed and gambling, there is no shortage of billion dollar businesses built on brain-altering, addictive products that may be a net negative for American society. The government actively grappling with these problems would be healthy and good; while everyone seems to agree that over-regulation has creeping, compounding negative consequences in a variety of areas, the next decade or two may remind us that a failure to regulate can be equally insidious.

To me, it’s becoming pretty clear that a defining challenge of the next generation in the U.S. will be to reject certain types of regulation while embracing others, and finding politicians who can reliably distinguish between the categories at issue. Good luck, you might say. And sure, it looks like one party has a tendency to regulate everything, everywhere, while the other has Donald Trump Jr. on the board of both Polymarket and Kalshi. Nevertheless, if a skeptic says it’s impossible for America to embrace regulation for personal behavior but exercise restraint with respect to industry, a historian might add that we did that for the first 75 years of the 20th Century.

The goal, in the broadest possible strokes, should be cutting away the web of bureaucratic and environmental red tape that has slowed everyone down (and driven a lot of industry offshore), while rediscovering the mettle to pass and enforce regulations that prioritize public welfare and productivity.

Anyone who cares about optimizing for national health had better invest in both sides of that spectrum.

Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.

We’re three days out from Super Bowl Sunday, and that gives me an excuse to zag a bit today and celebrate a football movie that was described in 1999 as “a film loaded with cynicism and choking on overbearing imagery that nevertheless winds up buying into many of the myths surrounding the sport.”

Yes, I’d like to add 27 years later, and that’s good.

Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday was considered over the top and sensational when it arrived in 1999, but it’s sentimental, too. That combination makes for a fun cultural document nearly 30 years later. Rewatching it recently, I was hooked within the first 10 minutes.

The Look and Feel of Pro Football

For anyone who hasn’t seen this movie in 20 years, the story opens with the Miami Sharks in the second quarter, at home against the Minnesota Americans (the NFL refused to license anything for this movie). In the very first scene, Miami’s star quarterback Jack “Cap” Rooney (Dennis Quaid) gets crunched between an unblocked linebacker and a blitzing safety, grimacing in pain on the ground until a sideline full of cameras and cheers from the crowd convince him to gamely hobble off the field. The next play, the backup quarterback, Tyler Cherubini, gets hit from behind, he gets injured, too, and his fumble is returned for a touchdown. On the ensuing possession, then, in goes 26 year-old, third-string quarterback Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx), a “mystery man” according to the play-by-play announcer. Beamen, memorably, vomits on the field before taking a snap.

All of this is great, standard sports movie stuff, and after Beamen calls audibles that don’t exist and struggles to get his bearings throughout his first series, the Sharks stagger into halftime down by three. Cut to the locker room, where an offensive lineman is demanding vicodin and cyclobenzaprine amid cramping, team doctors are arguing over the injury to Rooney, and assistant coach Montezuma Monroe (Jim Brown) is standing in front of a chalkboard and screaming at his defense: “We got the third string quarterback that ain’t gonna produce s***! And when I’m talking about the defense, goddamnit, you’re dumb enough, we made it simple enough! We made this s*** real f***ing simple.”

The chaos eventually gives way to a speech from legendary, Pantheon Cup-winning head coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino), which culminates with this:

TONY D’AMATO: We’re only down by three. We can win this one.

[locker room murmurs]

D’AMATO (screaming): We got three losses in a row!

D’AMATO (lowers his voice): I’m sick and tired of this. Are you? Because if you’re not, raise you’re hand. [D’AMATO raises his hand]. If you’re gonna act like a loser, raise your hand! If you’re gonna act like p***y, raise your hand!”

[Camera pans to the back of the locker room, star running back JULIAN WASHINGTON slowly standing on a chair to raise his hand]

D’AMATO: What the hell are you doing, J?

WASHINGTON: I didn’t want you to be the only p***y with his hand raised, Coach. So I figured I’d help you out.

[whole locker room erupts in laughter]

Successive generations have come to revere Pacino’s “Inches” speech at the end of this movie, and I’m certainly not here to argue; it’s one of the best sports movie scenes of all time. Still, as someone who’s spent a decent amount of time in and around pro sports, the moment above rings truer to what any of these worlds actually look and sound like. Because sure pro sports are full of egos and testosterone and occassionally dramatic speeches, but there’s also quite a bit of comedy that punctures all that tension on a regular basis. Guys being dudes, giving each other grief, etc.

There are a dozen more moments that capture that particular aspect of how the now-mind-blowingly successful NFL sausage gets made, like when linebacker Luther “Shark” Lavay (Lawrence Taylor) convinces Beamen to bring flowers to a meeting with his coach (who’s baffled by the gesture), or when Lavay confronts an offensive lineman about turning off postgame celebratory rap music to play hard rock. “Hell no!” Lavay says, “Not this Nazi rock shit again.” And the lineman responds: “Metallica ruuuuuuuules! Hetfield is God. We live to serve him.”

Nailing the emotional beats of pro athlete interactions is just one, minor charm of the the movie. In broader strokes, I was surprised by how well the football scenes hold up. This enjoyable reporting from Mike Freeman at the New York Times describes the painstaking steps Stone took to make the games realistic, including signing a cast full of extras from the Arena Football League, as well as then-active NFL players like Irving Fryar, Ricky Watters, and Terrell Owens. Stone held an 8-week training camp for the cast, and there was live hitting throughout the production. After filming a half-dozen takes of Watters colliding with a nearly-40 year-old Taylor on a fourth-and-one, LT was left dazed and lying on the field, with filming paused for nearly half-an-hour.

The camera work during games is jittery, full of abrasive jump cuts set to fast-paced music. All this was done in service of approximating on-field speed and power that was “shocking” to Stone, and which rarely comes through on a traditional TV broadcast. I’m no cinematography expert, but to the extent Stone is trying to make football look like barely controlled chaos moving so quickly and violently that just standing on the field would give any normal person a panic attack, the effects work.

Off the field, Stone talked to owners, coaches, team physicians, and even the wives and girlfriends of players, all to understand what they care about, what the experience of pro football really looks like for various stakeholders, and what drives tension. As Freeman wrote in 1999, “The movie shows how, if two players in a locker room do not like each other, the players’ wives or girlfriends will dislike each other as well. Such a scenario has happened several times with recent Giants teams.”

So, on the back of all that research and realism, there’s also the matter of the reviewer’s complaint at the top, that this film is “loaded with cynicism.” On that one… I don’t know! Many of the storylines that were read as overly cynical or sensational in 1999 have come to look prescient and borderline mundane.

The movie features an insecure new owner, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), who’s meddling with the coaching staff and using the threat of relocation to Los Angeles to extort Miami for a new, publicly funded stadium. Elsewhere, Lavay is a linebacker who continues playing despite risks of brain damage. One team doctor (James Woods) is colluding with the ownership to shield the extent of Lavay’s risk, promising a sleight of hand with test results the team “won’t forget come contract time.” There’s a quarterback, Rooney, who’s too injured to keep playing but too famous to quit. There’s a running back, Washington (LL Cool J), who wants more carries to ensure he hits his contract incentives. There’s a hotshot offensive coordinator, Nick Crozier (Aaron Eckhart), who thinks the team should be playing faster, taking more risks, and has tensions with the more traditional D’Amato.

Versions of all those stories have happened in real life, and continue to! That’s the NFL. None of these characters were invented or even particularly embellished.

Then there’s Jamie Foxx’s Willie Beamen, the engine of the movie as the third-string QB whose athleticism sparks a turnaround in Miami and who quickly becomes a household name. He reacts to his newfound fame by disregarding playcalls from the coaching staff, publicly taking shots at D’Amato (“Coach Stone Age”), and losing the locker room by taking shots at the defense. Now, is this part embellished? Is it realistic that all of this would happen in the span of three weeks? Of course not. But Beamen’s trajectory from precocious upstart to jaded and truculent superstar is pretty familiar to anyone who’s followed pro sports for the last 30 years.

In his one-on-one meeting with D’Amato, after exchanging flowers and pretending to enjoy his coach’s gumbo, the young quarterback lashes out when told Rooney will start the team’s playoff game in Texas:

BEAMEN: I seen a long line of coaches just like you, all the way from college with that same old bull***t halftime speech.

D’AMATO: Bull***t?

BEAMEN: Yes, it’s bull***t. You know, you always bull***t, because it’s about the money. Raking in the TV contracts, fat cat boosters sitting the sky box, the coaches trying to up their salaries. And the whole time what you looking for? You looking for the next black stud to take you to the top ten. Get you in a bowl game. It’s the same way in the pros, except in the pros, the field hands get paid.

D’AMATO: Come on, don’t play that race card on me, kid. Twenty-five years I work with men of your color.

BEAMEN: Maybe it’s not racism. Maybe it’s place-ism. Brother has to know his place. Right, boss?

The reason the movie works, and is smarter than it gets credit for, is that Beamen’s perspective is not endorsed. Yes, he’s got legitimate grievances with D’Amato’s playcalling, and certainly with the coaches who played him out of position in college, or teams that didn’t draft him because of trumped up NCAA violations—two pitfalls for young, black athletes that were very real 25 years ago. But when he draws on those experiences and sneers to an interviewer that “football is a corporation,” the only character who agrees with him is peevish TV host who says, “Your smack is so fresh. It’s so on time. It’s so truthful.”

The actual truth is more complicated in Stone’s rendering: football is a business, but it can’t be purely transactional if you want to succeed. So Beamen’s interview ends, and the movie immediately jumps to Shark Lavay in a hot tub, hearing about his young quarterback taking shots at the defense, and then interrupting a team party by chain-sawing Beamen’s yellow Tahoe into two pieces (“In football there’s an offense and a defense, you can’t have one without the other.”). From there, Beamen starts the final game of the regular season, it’s a disaster, and he gets punched in the face in the shower.

Meanwhile, Beamen’s fake-deep musings are bookended a few scenes later by Coach Jim Brown at a bar, lamenting that in his day players used to sell liquor and wrestle in the offseason, while today’s players have year-round training regimens and bodies that crack like china. A drunk Al Pacino answers that point by blaming TV for corrupting the purity of the game he used to coach. “The first time they cut away to commercial,” he says, “that was the end of it.”

They don’t sound wise, either—just old.

The Moral of This Story

Any Given Sunday was largely panned critically when it was released (Rotten Tomatoes score: 51%) and it’s full of shagginess and heavy-handed imagery (there are Roman chariots from Ben Hur interspersed at one point) that may not be for everyone. Without poring too much over contemporary reviews, I recall that people who loved the NFL thought the movie’s depiction of the league’s corruption was way over the top, while others, maybe more open to NFL skepticism, seemed disappointed it wasn’t more negative. As the New York Times wrote in 1999, “Although the story presents many opportunities for tragedy (some situations practically beg for it), ‘Any Given Sunday’ turns ludicrously upbeat…”

Regardless, what I found rewatching it was a surprisingly resonant great time. For one thing, I didn’t realize until writing this article how much I adore the names of everyone involved here. Willie Beamen as the young black quarterback, Montezuma Monroe (!!!) as the defensive coordinator, Nick Crozier as the whiz kid OC, Julian Washington as the running back, Luther “Shark” Lavay, Jack “Cap” Rooney, Dr. Harvey Mandrake, Tyler Cherubini… On and on and on. For character names alone, this is hands down the best sports movie of my lifetime.

Elsewhere, the football scenes are solid, the emotional beats land (“Don’t you drop me… I’m worth a million dollars”), and some of the best performances in the movie come from Jim Brown and Lawrence Taylor, two of the most legendary players in the history of the sport. And sure, the story is full of stock characters who don’t develop that much—another critic nitpick—but what I enjoy about the writing 27 years later is that there was no Twitter-brained self-consciousness about dealing in cliches or taboos; as a result, the broad characters in this movie are actually a more honest look at the virtues and blindspots of modern athletes than you’ll find in most of today’s media coverage.

The Hollywood Reporter complained in 1999 that “[t]here is no area of professional football in which Stone and fellow writers John Logan and Daniel Pyne do not see money-hungry, ego-gratifying misbehavior.” In other words, then, they had eyes. The NFL, for its part, complained that Stone’s script does not “accurately or positively portray our players, club owners or club personnel.” Stone, on the other hand, said, “This movie is a tribute to the players of the NFL, because they sacrifice everything to play this sport.”

To that end, the movie stops short of indicting an entire industry the way, say, Stone’s Wall Street did. The restraint shown in that regard lends a sneaky bit of depth to a movie in which Lawrenece Taylor saws a Tahoe in half and a lineman releases a baby alligator into the team showers (among other things). Indeed, a lesser version of this project could have been a polemic painting the NFL as a morally bankrupt universe, or maybe been framed as a simpler story around Beamen or D’Amato as a singular hero—the old coach trying to prevent the game from losing its soul to capitalism, or the young quarterback fighting conservative shackles and trying to usher in a more progressive style and get paid.

The moral of this story, though, is merely that both those perspectives exist in parallel, and each side has some valid points. That rings truer to how any of this works. Draymond Green doesn’t win titles without Steve Kerr, the inverse is equally true, and similar, barely functional dynamics exists in dozens of other locker rooms throughout pro sports. Everyone has worked a lifetime to get to these levels, is sacrificing a great deal to stay there, and has to trust people they can’t fully control as the most dramatic moments of their lives play out in real time.

The movie resolves its own version of that drama with an uplifting and fun note, apparently to the chagrin of that Times critic. And yes, it’s fair to see the health risks, ethical compromises and corporate incentives endemic to pro football and conclude this movie lets the league off easy. The media’s NFL conversations certainly went the other direction for much of the 2010s, back when everyone was writing their “Why I stopped watching football” essays.

What I love about Any Given Sunday, though, is that for all the prescient and unsparing portrayals of greed, sex, drugs, corrupt team doctors, craven owners, and concussion risks—many of the same issues that led to that NFL backlash—the movie itself never makes the mistake of judging the characters who choose to dedicate their lives to this enterprise. Instead, you can tell that Stone’s interviews with players and coaches made an impression. Football, it turns out, does in fact transform lives and provide meaning to a wide variety of people who are not merely rubes tricked into a lifetime in the meatgrinder. We see humanity and dignity in the linebacker who wants to hit his million dollar bonus regardless of the health risks, the coach who gave his life to the game even if it cost him his family, or the quarterback who became famous, became insufferable, and then re-centered himself.

It would have been easy to make an NFL movie that grabs at the low-hanging fruit, debunks much of the sport’s mythology, and adopts the scathing cynicism of some of Stone’s characters. Maybe that movie gets better reviews, but it probably struggles to resonate nearly 30 years later, because at a fundamental level its conclusions would be simplistic, incomplete and hollow.

Cynicism that’s presented as wisdom is often its own form of naïveté. Real intelligence, on the other hand, will recognize a chaotic world for exactly what it is and find reasons to love it anyway.

Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.

Let’s stipulate up front: Former Mavericks GM Nico Harrison wasn’t right when he traded Luka Doncic. He could have gotten a better return than he did. He should have had conversations with more than one or two teams as he investigated trade possibilities. He was bizarrely tone deaf in his messaging to Mavericks fans. And even last February, before it all went awry in a heap of injuries and fan protests, the plan to build a championship team around Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving didn’t make much sense to anyone who had watched either of those players attempt to lead teams for the previous 10 years. So, no arguments there. Nico’s execution was a problem. However…

The Luka trade was derided first and foremost because the whole world agreed it was certifiably insane to trade a future Hall of Famer who was 25 years old, nine months removed from an NBA Finals appearance, and all set to sign a 5-year, $345 million contract extension that would have kept him in Dallas through 2031. Sure, the return was deemed insufficient, but the shock of trading a beloved prodigy in the middle of his prime, suddenly deciding that Luka was a bad bet, is why the world lost its mind. It’s why a quick Google search finds The Ringer calling Harrison an all-time embarrassment and the Wall Street Journal calling the Luka deal the worst trade in NBA history.

We’re approaching the one year anniversary of all that madness—Luka and the Lakers are also set to visit Dallas on Saturday night—and Greatest of All Talk listeners will remember that elements of the volcanic backlash to the trade annoyed me even last February. For one thing, there were lots of extremely personal attacks on Harrison and his intelligence that didn’t sit right with me. More generally, everyone was speaking and writing with so much authority and certainty on how all this will be remembered, and it set off some of my bullshit alarms.

Luka was being discussed like he was 25 year-old Michael Jordan, and there was no humility with respect to NBA history, and how much of this particular story remained unwritten. There was not much curiosity as to why people like Harrison and Jason Kidd, who were around Luka every day, might have moved on, or the many different outcomes that were—and are!—still on the board.

Consider the beginning of that Ringer column, which ran after Harrison was fired by the Mavericks in November:

And just like that, the man behind the dumbest in the history of the NBA is out of a job. Who could’ve seen this coming? Nine months after Nico Harrison decided it was time to get out of the Luka Doncic business—still such a comically unfathomable, shortsighted move—Dallas Mavericks owner Patrick Dumont finally came to the conclusion that enough was enough on Tuesday. 

That lede echoes the way the NBA media has characterized the trade for the past 12 months. My guess is the story will be understood differently as time passes. Based on what we’ve seen in Los Angeles, there’s a good chance that getting out of the Luka Doncic business will not be seen as shortsighted, and that over time that decision will, in fact, become much easier for everyone to fathom.

One year later, let’s get into it.

What’s Going Wrong for Luka and the Lakers?

Statistically, Doncic is having a phenomenal season. He was a named All-Star starter in the Western Conference earlier this week, and he’s leading the league in scoring averaging 33 points-per-game, 7.5 rebounds, and nearly nine assists. After the Lakers lost in five games in the first round of last year’s playoffs, J.J. Redick challenged him to come back in “championship shape,” and Doncic did just that. A few days before he signed a three-year contract extension worth $165 million, he appeared in Men’s Health looking noticeably slimmer and more toned than last season. A month later, the PR push continued, and he was appearing in Wall Street Journal‘s magazine for a cover story headlined, “Welcome to the Luka Doncic Revenge Tour.”

The tour got off to a fantastic start. Luka looked and played great, and even without LeBron for the first month, the Lakers started 15-4. Luka looked like an MVP candidate and one of the three best players alive. All of this coincided with a Mavs season that was cratering with Kyrie Irving sidelined and Anthony Davis out of shape and playing sporadically at best; for a few weeks in late October and early November, right before Nico Harrison was fired, the deal to move Doncic absolutely did look like one of the most regrettable decisions in NBA history.

But the season didn’t end there. Since the 15-4 start for the Lakers, Austin Reaves went down with a calf strain and the Lakers have been flatlining. They’re 10-10 in games Doncic has played since December 1st, and 11-12 overall. Of the losses, 10 of 12 have come by double digits. In other words, when it breaks bad for the Lakers, it gets ugly, and lately, that happens about twice a week. They’re still sixth in the West standings, but just barely. Their point differential is worse than the Charlotte Hornets or Orlando Magic, and only slightly better than the 20-24 Los Angeles Clippers, who were, until recently, in the middle of one of the most depressing seasons in NBA history.

To be clear, what’s happening here is not primarily Luka’s fault. This is a transitional season in L.A.; the team’s paying $52 million to LeBron James, whose athleticism is gone and who can’t play defense anymore, and who was not offered a contract extension last summer. Last summer the front office wanted to keep its books clean for the 2026 offseason and beyond, so this year’s roster is full of imperfect, stop-gap gambles (Jake LaRavia, Marcus Smart, Deandre Ayton), past experiments that failed to launch (Gabe Vincent, Jaxson Hayes), one-way holdovers from a previous era (Rui Hachimura, Jarred Vanderbilt), cast-off success stories (Nick Smith Jr., Drew Timme?), and Bronny James (Bronny James).

Despite the balky roster construction, the formula can work for them in the regular season if Doncic plays like an MVP candidate and either LeBron or Reaves is putting up All-NBA numbers. On the other hand, that kind of Reaves or James production is a pretty tough standard to sustain for seven months straight, let alone for multiple playoff rounds. More pertinent for this column, Luka hasn’t looked like an MVP candidate for two months.

His numbers are a bit misleading. Watch the Lakers, and Doncic is not only not a one-man solution, but he’s often part of the problem for a team that can’t defend, lacks athleticism, and seems to check out when things get hard. His body language isn’t great, and despite the Men’s Health photoshoot from August and all the revenge tour talk, he seems to be out of shape again. This isn’t a surprise to longtime Luka watchers—contrary to some peers who play themselves into shape, Luka’s conditioning often gets worse during the NBA season, while playing a full slate of games. There are various theories as to how that happens and why Luka’s conditioning is such a struggle, and the Mavs reportedly had concerns about his drinking. Whatever the cause, this has always been a question of basic professionalism for a star basketball player, and we’re sort of back to square one.

The lack of conditioning manifests as some of the softest defense in the NBA, but more concerning for the future, it’s also affecting his offense. He’s never moved off the ball when other players are initiating, and as Ben Golliver pointed out at the Washington Post this week, Doncic is now taking only seven percent of his shots at the rim this season, down from 26 percent during his first All-Star season. Compare that number to Anthony Edwards shots at the rim (20%), Cade Cunningham (17%), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (19%), Tyrese Maxey (24%), Donovan Mitchell (19%), or even guys like Jamal Murray and Jalen Brunson (13%).

Doncic isn’t getting downhill and creating advantages the way he used to, or the way all other superstar guards continue to. Instead, watch the Lakers and you’ll see for stepback after stepback after stepback, with some early shot-clock pull-ups and contested midrange shots sprinkled in along the way. It’s a testament to his talent that he can still lead the league in scoring that way, but the numbers mask the reality that 26 year-old Luka is playing like 36 year-old James Harden (13% of shots at the rim this year, down from 25% when he was Luka’s age). His shooting has fallen off, too, which may be another byproduct of poor conditioning—he’s taking ten threes-per-game, many of them lazy shots early in the shot clock, without probing the defense, and he’s hitting 33% on those shots.

“It’s not just physical shape,” Doncic said when he was asked about Redick’s challenge at the beginning of the season. “It’s mental shape, too.” Well, mentally, in some these losses Luka looks preoccupied with the officials, making this at least the fifth straight season that he’s more dedicated more energy to complaining about calls than he does playing defense.

Luka is still unbelievably good. He’s a perennial All-Star, and when he’s rolling, there’s nothing a defense can do. He’s terrifying to criticize in print or on podcasts, because on any given night he can look like one of the greatest players of all time and make you look like an idiot. That’s all still true. But none of the concerns above are particularly subjective. It’s just a fact that Doncic is a heliocentric scorer who doesn’t move off the ball, doesn’t play defense, and doesn’t attack the rim anymore, making him heavily reliant on a jumper that comes and goes. His shot selection can be lazy and frustrating, and where a 26 year-old LeBron James would be dominant enough in every phase of the game to make the Lakers quasi-contenders despite the roster’s flaws, Luka is dominant enough to get his numbers despite those flaws. Quasi-contention is looking less likely.

What Do the Next Five Years Look Like?

To understand where this may go over the next several years, let’s go back to the 2024 Finals. After leading the Mavs through the West and making it to his first NBA Finals, Doncic was humiliated by the Celtics. Playing through nagging injuries, Luka was exploited over and over again on defense. Rather than a coronation for the player of a generation, that series became a lesson in what championship basketball actually requires. And here again, the loss wasn’t strictly on Luka—Kyrie was terrible—but he was more of a problem than a solution in that series.

All of this was memorialized by ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, in a bracing and frank answer to Scott Van Pelt after the Mavs lost a decisive Game 3 at home:

I’m standing here in the Mavericks tunnel, over there is the Celtics tunnel. That’s where the winners are. If Luka’s ever going to be a winner, coming out of this tunnel here, he’s going to have to use what’s happened in this Finals as a learning experience. His defensive performance is unacceptable. He is a hole on the court. The Celtics are attacking him. They are ahead in this series because they have attacked him defensively.

And you’ve got a situation here where Luka’s complaining about the officiating… [the Mavericks] have begged him. They have talked with him. They have pleaded with him. He is costing his team because of how he treats the officials. He’s a brilliant player, he does so many things well. They are here because of how he did. His performance in this game is unacceptable, and the reason why the Mavericks are not going to win.

He’s got to get over this. And the fact that he came out after the game and blamed the officials, showed me he’s nowhere close yet. So maybe over the summer, somebody will get to him. Because nobody with the Mavericks, or anybody else in his life, has.

Rewatching that clip this week, one aspect that I’d forgotten about is that as soon Luka fouled out, he yelled at the ref and begins to make a money gesture with his hands (implying the NBA Finals refs are on the take) before catching himself, at which point he redirected his energy and screamed at the Mavericks coaching staff to “challenge the fucking call!” (which was a pretty clear blocking foul). That split-second is one data point to consider when future generations wonder how in the world the Mavs could have moved on from their franchise player.

In any event, not much has changed in the 18 months since that clip. Moreover, everything the Celtics did to Luka, the Golden State Warriors also did to Luka during the 2022 Western Conference Finals—targeting him on defense, exploiting his lapses, and annihilating his team across five games.

That Warriors series wasn’t a turning point, and despite Windhorst’s best efforts, neither was the Celtics series. Luka followed his Finals reality check by showing up out of shape the following year in Dallas, and beginning the season with more awful defense, a Mavs team that sputtered out of the gate, and what was reported to be an 11-day leave of absence from the team to get in shape (followed by Luka’s fourth calf strain in three years).

The trade last February was supposed to be a turning point, too, and so was a five-game playoff loss to the Timberwolves and a public conditioning challenge from J.J. Redick. In the interest of fairness, we can say the jury is still out as to whether any corners have or will be turned this year. But while we wait, I’d suggest more basketball fans make room for the possibility that this is just who Doncic is going to be. And going forward for the Lakers, building a championship team around him is going to be harder than people realize.

There are ultimately three big red flags for the future:

• The roster. Conventional wisdom says the answer to this year’s defensive struggles is to move on from LeBron and then surround Doncic with athletic defenders who can cover for his weaknesses, but those players are hard to find! LaRavia has been fine as a fifth starter, but someone like Ayton’s not good enough to contend with. So, for example, where is the path to a center who can anchor a championship team? And how are you filling the other five rotation spots in a league where Desmond Bane and Mikal Bridges went for a combined nine first round picks? Mark Williams nearly cost two first round picks, and would that investment have made any difference to this year’s Lakers? Clean cap sheet or not, the role players who are going to be available to replace Rui Hachimura and Deandre Ayton aren’t likely to be that much better than Hachimura or Ayton.
  
  
• The window. Winning a title with a roster built around Luka will require luck and skill on the margins, but it will also require Luka to be one of the three best players in the NBA at the center of that mix. And how much longer can the Lakers be certain he’ll be at that level? Because of Luka’s body and how he’s likely to age—and how he’s already aging—the window to capitalize on his talent is now, and within the next few years. For example, it’s already debatable as to whether Cade Cunningham and Anthony Edwards are better than Luka today, but how might those debates look in three years? While Cunningham looks like an All-NBA mainstay, and Edwards has incrementally improved every year he’s been in the NBA, nothing Doncic has shown over the past few years should make the Lakers especially confident in his ability to adapt, improve, take care of his body, and arrive at his 30th birthday playing better than he did at 25. This means that on top of a roster building challenge that looks pretty tricky on any timeline, there may less runway than you’d think to put the pieces in place that make this work at a championship level.
  
  
• The contract. Doncic is under contract for two more seasons after this one, at which point he can opt-out and sign a 5-year, $418 million contract extension that begins in 2028. And as soon as he signs that deal, it becomes even harder for the Lakers to build around him. This particular red flag isn’t really even a reflection on Luka (although I do wonder what $418 million would mean for his conditioning adventures). Building around any player who makes $80 million per year is going to be very difficult, and there are only a handful of players dominant enough to anchor a title contender in that context. The league’s new CBA handicaps teams trying to build around its most bankable stars; this is flat out stupid for the NBA’s interests as a whole, but that’s a separate conversation. What matters here is that it’s a dynamic that’s real and not going away, and it will likely complicate the second half of Luka’s career, particularly if he’s not quite at the peak of his powers.
  

The final two concerns there—Luka’s lack of professionalism and what that portends for durability and longevity, coupled with a massive price tag that constrains long term flexibility and leaves no room for error—were why Harrison made the move last February. For everyone else: consider the lack of progress on the court (on defense, dealing with the refs, shot selection that’s getting lazier), and couple that with conditioning that continues to be a problem even at 26 years old. Can anyone really say the decision to not pay him $345 million is “unfathomable”? Shocking, risky, arguably heartless. Sure. But the logic wasn’t particularly revolutionary. Betting on the second half of Luka’s career to be more successful than the first is beginning to look like a losing proposition. Dallas pivoted before the story got there.

The Legacy of the Worst Trade in NBA History

Let me reiterate that there’s no version of this story that ends with Nico Harrison vindicated. Landing Cooper Flagg last June was NOT part of the plan, or the vision, and aside from my stipulations at the top, “getting out of the Luka business” is only a reasonable idea if you confine that business strictly to basketball. The problem for Nico and Mavs owner Patrick Dumont is that professional sports teams are on some level a public trust, and decision making has to account for more than just cap sheets and championship odds. The emotional connections Luka had to Dallas and its fans were real, and the investments they’d made in Luka’s story were literal. The pre-trade Mavs had a genuine title contender assembled in Dallas and they owed it to their paying customers to give it a few more shots with Doncic before evaluating what made the most sense for the organization. Trading Luka when they did was actually sort of sociopathic when considered alongside the human connections that make basketball profitable in any local context. Harrison never quite acknowledged those connections, or how wrenching the trade must have been for people who love the Mavs. Repairing that relationship with fans is why he ultimately had to be fired, and destroying it in the first place is why his legacy as crazed GM villain is understandable, if a bit overstated.

As for the Lakers, regardless of the concerns outlined above, they still make the Luka trade 100 times out of 100. The deal provided an off-ramp from the current era and a bridge to something new. Whether any of this works or not, the possibilities of an era built around Doncic are better than a guaranteed two or three more years of fake contention built around LeBron and AD, particularly since the Mavericks allowed the Lakers to sidestep a 5-7 year journey into the rebuilding wilderness. Also, in the middle of all this, the team was sold at a $1o billion valuation. Thanks Nico!

As for the trade itself? We’ll see. History is often weirder and more absurd than we can predict, which is why I was annoyed by the hivemind insistence that this deal was an inexplicable disaster destined to be mocked for generations to come. For now, we can say for certain that Nico Harrison was wrong to discount what Luka meant to Dallas. He was wrong to bet that Kyrie Irving could be a proto-Kobe in a post-Luka era. He was wrong to bet on Anthony Davis, who was technically injured when Harrison traded for him and has proceeded to get re-injured in several new ways since last February. Harrison was even wrong, if we’re being comprehensive, to follow the AD acquisition with a bizarre deal to add Caleb Martin, another player who was injured at the time he arrived in Dallas and never moved the needle for the Mavs. Harrison also failed to replace Doncic with another guard, putting a huge burden on Kyrie, who tore his ACL a month after the trade.

Indeed, Nico was wrong about basically everything. But he might have been right about Luka.

Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.

Let’s begin 2026 with a bit of geopolitics, and a note from Dan Wang’s annual year-end letter, musing about the preponderance of Sputnik moments that lead nowhere:

One of the startling geopolitical moves of the year was how quickly Donald Trump withdrew his ~150 percent tariffs on China. Trump folded not out of beneficence, but because Xi Jinping denied rare earth magnets to most of the world, threatening many types of manufacturing operations. And yet I’m struck by Beijing’s relative restraint. Chinese producers are close to being monopolists not only in rare earths, but also electronics products, batteries, and many types of active pharmaceutical ingredients. In case China denies, say, cardiovascular drugs to the elderly, how long could a state hold out?

One might have expected the US to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war. But there have been too many declarations of Sputnik Moments without commensurate action. Barack Obama declared a Sputnik with China’s high-speed rail; Mark Warner repeated with Huawei’s 5G; Marc Andreessen called it with DeepSeek. The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously.

That passage resonated for a few reasons. First, it’s just a good observation: there have been lots of purported Sputnik moments in recent years! Second, the collective meltdown in the wake of DeepSeek’s R1 release last year is still amazing to look back on (approaching the one year anniversary!), and as someone who follows China news every week, I can attest that that sort of fevered, existential dread is not rare (Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro and its 7 nm chip inspired a similar wave of alarm across Washington). And finally, paranoid AI and chip hyperbole nowithstanding, Wang asks a serious question that I come back to frequently: if these two countries are trending toward a full decoupling and a prolonged conflict, then why isn’t the US acting like it?

Aside from rhetorical commitments to restoring domestic industrial capacity and a variety of China Select Committee investigations that tend to go ignored, there’s near-weekly evidence that Congress and the current administration are not entirely serious about leading a whole of nation effort to eliminate regulatory bottlenecks to power abundance, bring pharmaceutical production onshore, mine and refine rare earths, and reduce the leverage that China has over the U.S. economy in about a dozen different areas. Absent solutions on any of those fronts, some of which will take years, Trump couldn’t even ban TikTok. Then, just before Christmas, the U.S. greenlit the sale of high-end Nvidia chips that could help Chinese companies narrow the gap with U.S. competitors in AI. If successfully navigating a prolonged competition with China requires not only acknowledging said competition but actually making the sacrifices necessary to win it, one could be forgiven for reading the news over the past 10 years and concluding that America simply doesn’t have the mettle to prioritize long term national interests over short term private interests (or political incentives).

Wang, who earlier in 2025 penned the New York Times bestseller Breakneck, about China’s quest to engineer the technological future, published his year-end letter on New Year’s Day. Then, 36 hours after reading his warnings about American complacency, I opened WhatsApp to find a flurry of messages and tweets about a Delta Force operation to capture and exfiltrate Nicolas Maduro from Caracas, fly him to Manhattan to face prosecution on drug charges, and replace him with a government that’s beholden to the United States.

Now when I re-read Wang asking whether America can rouse itself to respond to competitive threats from its greatest adversaries, I can’t help but wonder whether the world just watched the U.S. provide an answer.

What the U.S. Wants in Venezuela

Attempting to parse the logic and implications of this operation is not easy, and possibly ill-advised. The facts on the ground will continue to evolve, as will our understanding of last week’s operation. With that caveat noted, and having just recorded a Sharp China episode that was largely focused on China’s reaction to these developments, I’ll work from what’s known today and share why I’m encouraged by what the U.S. is attempting here.

First, there’s the threshold matter of who’s driving these policies and what that means for how they’re perceived. Let’s stipulate the Trump administration says and does a number of things that are unbecoming of the Presidency. I won’t list my personal grievances and specific examples of the lack of humanity, judgment and/or tact of the current administration, but suffice to say I understand why anyone would be exhausted and deeply uncomfortable with this presidency. On the other hand, where Trump critics tend to err is in the assumption that because he is often careless and objectionable, everything he does is careless and objectionable. If you start from the premise that Trump is simply a boorish moron who’s unfit to hold power in any context, there’s a risk that confirmation bias will distort the analysis of whether any of his policies are reasonable or effective. This leads to buying into resistance fan fiction like “Trump didn’t support an incredibly risky, full scale regime change because of bitterness over the Nobel Peace Prize,” and, a more relevant risk for his political opponents, it leads to opposing a good number of broadly popular policies and initiatives.

Going the the other direction here, and treating Trump like a historical figure worth thinking about with a bit more intellectual rigor, one of the most perceptive (and concise!) reads on Trump-era policy came early last year from a Bank of Japan Deputy Governor named Himino Ryozo. Remarking on tariffs and how Japan should view the U.S. under Trump, Himino began his comments by saying:

If I could offer some personal and tentative reflections, I would argue that there are three characteristics that define the current administration’s way of thinking.

First, the administration adopts a holistic approach and treats political, economic, and cultural matters, as well as domestic and international affairs, as integral parts of a single, inseparable policy agenda.

Second, while it is highly flexible in its tactical decisions, switching its approaches as situations evolve and choosing when to press ahead, pause, or make temporary retreats, the administration remains persistent in its strategic choices about what it ultimately aims to attain.

Third, it is unfettered from conventional wisdom and orthodoxy, focuses on facts that define the locus and sources of power, and explores opportunities that have thus far not been exploited.

The analysis above applies pretty cleanly to the news of this week. I don’t have a security clearance, but it seems likely that U.S. national interests driving engagement in Venezuela are related to countering transnational narcotics gangs, controlling the flow of oil, securing access to critical minerals, power projection, and national security. The U.S. was negotiating a peaceful Maduro exit to Turkey in late December; when that offer was rejected, there was a pivot.

Maduro was a repressive, corrupt dictator who oversaw human rights violations and suffering on a mass scale. My own lesson in that respect came when I saw the Venezuela’s basketball team at the Rio Olympics in 2016 and met a Venezuelan fan who told me through a translator that he was filling his suitcase with medicine to bring back to his his mother and grandmother, all while the team played in Rio amid a widespread hunger crisis back home (and spoke very carefully about it). There have been two rigged elections since then, and removing Maduro now is hopefully a step in the right direction for the Venezuelan people.

Still, there are corrupt, inhumane leaders all over the world. As to the American interests that justified capturing this one, with one of the most audacious U.S. military operations of my lifetime, Marco Rubio appeared on “Meet The Press” this week and said the following:

“What we’re not going to allow is for the oil industry in Venezuela to be controlled by adversaries of the United States. You have to understand, why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? Why does Iran need their oil? They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live, and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”

It would be easy to focus on the first half of the answer—oil! Iraq part two!—and miss the far more important note on Venezuela as a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States. By many accounts, that’s precisely what Venezuela had become.

For example, this article from Renegade Resources was compelling, outlining the extensive ties between Venezuela and Russia, which sells arms to Venezuelans and trains them (“Over 120 Russian troops operate in Venezuela under Lieutenant General Oleg Makarevich, leading what Ukrainian intelligence identifies as the “Equator Task Force.’”); Iran, which sold even more arms to Venezuela and has an operational presence in the country (“Documented Iranian weapons transfers to Venezuela since 2020 include Mohajer-6 unmanned aerial vehicles with 2,000 kilometer operational range, sufficient to reach any target in Florida. Venezuela has publicly displayed these systems in military parades from 2021 through 2023.”); and then China, which has flooded the country with investment and cornered the market on critical minerals extraction (“Western nations seeking to diversify away from Chinese processing looked to Venezuela, only to discover Chinese buyers already controlled extraction operations. This is strategic encirclement where China dominates both global processing infrastructure and alternative source extraction”). There was also a note this week from former Biden NSC official Rush Doshi, who wrote that “The PRC has long pursued military sites in Latin America,” and that “prominent PRC figures confirmed to me directly [one desired site] was Venezuela.”

This overview of Unmanned and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles highlights another potentially urgent security risk, noting that Venezuela’s coastline “sits close enough to the Panama Canal, Gulf shipping lanes, and cable approaches that UUVs can operate without long transits draining their batteries.” Undersea drones were recently deployed to great effect in the Ukraine war and are incredibly difficult to defend against. The hypothetical risk of deploying them from Venezuela to disrupt U.S. internet cables and shipping lanes illustrates the more concrete problem with allowing hostile foreign adversaries to deeply embed military assets in a country within the Western Hemisphere. If the U.S. intends to defend Taiwan, or Ukraine, or fight battles anywhere else in the world, it’s a potentially history-altering liability if China, Russia and/or Iran have the capability to paralyze the U.S. economy from South America (and exhaust U.S. resources addressing the problem).

Finally, while the ultimate value of Venezuelan oil to the United States is debatable, the value of that oil to China is more interesting. To wit, restricting oil exports to Cuba could spell disaster for the communist regime within months, which would be bad news for Russia and China, both of whom maintain extensive signals intelligence operations in the country. Additionally, this highly technical post about oil composition and global refining capacity argues that if U.S.-aligned producers in Venezulea stop shipping oil to China, over the long term, it could force China into a single point of dependence on Iran for certain critical oil imports (Canada is potentially a player here too, while reliance on the Iranian regime is increasingly looking like a pretty big wild card). On the other hand, if US-aligned producers in Venezuela do ship to China, but retain the power to pause those shipments, that creates leverage over the Chinese industrial complex that mimics rare earth export controls and creates “a very real wartime advantage against China.”

That post concludes by observing of the strategic advantage, “It’s likely the US does not recognize this fully. They just wanted China OUT.” Which brings us to a headline from Tuesday night—Trump demands Venezuela kick out China and Russia, partner only with US on oil: EXCLUSIVE.

What the US does and doesn’t recognize about the scale of its opportunity is an open question, and there’s room to debate how much strategic leverage America will actually gain. Regardless, it certainly looks like the U.S. is in a better strategic position today than it was a week ago. The same cannot be said for Russia, Iran, or the CCP, which had an “all-weather strategic partnership” with the Maduro regime, had Chinese delegates meeting with the former president hours before he was captured, and is now left hoping that the U.S. continues to sell them oil.

The Cold War That Was Never Announced

Many of my millennial peers processed the news last weekend and immediately thought about the Iraq War. I get that. Those were formative political years for an entire generation that was then conditioned to be skeptical of military engagement specifically and Republicans generally. None of us have lived in a world where there’s active tension with rival superpower. Moreover, to anyone who’s not been paying close attention to the threats facing the U.S. in any wartime scenario, and the extent to which those threats have expanded and evolved over the past 10 years, a Delta Force helicopter invasion to capture a world leader on foreign soil, in violation of International Law, sounds like something that would be too stupid even for Dick Cheney, but might be pushed by Donald Rumsfeld.

Also, let’s go back to Sputnik. The reason there’s never been a Sputnik moment that resonates with the mainstream is because most people don’t even know the U.S. is in the middle of another cold war. David Wallace-Wells had a good column about this dynamic for the New York Times last year, noting that “part of how Americans made sense of their rivalry with the Soviet Union was through popular culture,” while “this time, there has been essentially none of that — no real effort in Hollywood to make use of high-stakes global conflict even as a narrative crutch.” But of course Hollywood’s not doing that; Zootopia 2 just made a billion dollars thanks to the Chinese market. And in all seriousness, given the economic interdependence of the US and China, there are lots of incentives to not declare a cold war, mobilizing the entire United States public behind efforts that will take years, while tanking the retirement accounts of 100 million Americans in the meantime.

All this makes for a bewildering landscape in which the U.S. is on one hand taking certain steps that seem reckless, overtly aggressively, and unprecedented in the modern world, and on the other hand conducting business mostly as usual. The Administration itself does not make it any easier; unlike the Bush administration pushing Yellow Cake stories in 2002, none of the asymmetric threats described above have been cited publicly, while Trump talks often about his “great relationship with Xi Jinping.” After meeting Xi in November he referred to the US and China as the “G2” and wrote, “This meeting will lead to everlasting peace and success. God bless both China and the USA!” He’s set to visit Beijing in March, and U.S. countermeasures on China are paused indefinitely in service of a trade war truce to keep rare earths flowing for at least the next 10 months.

It’s certainly possible that Trump’s critics are right and he is a credulous fool, easily flattered, destined to start pointless wars, destroy relationships with allies, and forge a grand bargain that hands China control of Taiwan. Chinese scholars certainly hope so. My guess, though, is that those assessments will ultimately look facile. Trump’s words have successfully mollified the Chinese and kept rare earths flowing to U.S. industry, but last weekend’s actions reflect an American security apparatus that understands the scale of its modern threats and the urgency of addressing them.

Here’s to betting that there will be more moves that bend the norms of the postwar liberal order but nevertheless advance American interests in ways that will benefit successive administrations from either party. As for Venezuela, it’s still early. It will be several years before we know whether any of this was truly successful. In the meantime what we can say for certain is that last weekend’s operation an attempt at fortifying regional security that may weaken some of America’s greatest adversaries. If not quite a race to the moon, it was the latest reminder that we’re all living in a different world these days.

Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.